The Myth of the Monoglot World: Why English Hegemony is Officially Over

English carried the subdued assurance of an empire that no longer required soldiers for the majority of the previous century. Pop songs, airline announcements, textbooks, and the fine print on prescription bottles all carried it.

In Asia and Africa, entire generations were raised with the belief that thinking in English was necessary to think seriously, make a good living, and be taken seriously at all. Now, that belief is starting to falter, and it’s doing so in unexpected places.

Contradictions are immediately apparent when you enter a private college campus in Bangalore on a weekday afternoon. In the hallways, students alternate between Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, and Malayalam. As soon as a faculty member shows up, they switch to clear, cautious English. By policy, only English is allowed in the classrooms. They’re not the canteens. When you listen to them, you get the impression that the language they perform in and the language they truly live in are gradually diverging. This time, the drift might not be in favor of English.

The numbers that underlie this are more bizarre than they seem. Less than 5% of Indians speak English fluently, despite the country having the third-largest English-speaking population in the world. The others negotiate, mistranslate, and navigate. For many years, this gap was seen as a weakness that needed to be filled with new pedagogies, communicative skills modules, and spoken English coaching centers that appeared next to tea shops.

English became more than just a subject during the neoliberal turn of the 2000s, particularly in private higher education. It became a prerequisite for almost everything, including employment, scholarships, and a particular social status.

However, something has changed, and it wasn’t due to policy. Infrastructure was the source of it. AI translation that no longer sounds like a broken fax machine, inexpensive data, and regional-language keyboards. A Telugu speaker in Hyderabad can now read summaries of German court decisions in his own script, watch Korean dramas dubbed into Telugu, and conduct real-time captioned meetings with clients in São Paulo.

On the periphery, the Internet is subtly doing the opposite of what academics once feared would solidify English’s hegemony. The global North is still given preference. The majority of knowledge traffic is still routed via English-language servers. However, there is a leak in the monopoly.

It’s difficult to ignore the fact that institutions, not people, are now the most fierce defenders of English supremacy. Hiring committees continue to look for candidates who sound, as one professor I spoke with put it, “like she could host a podcast.” University administrations continue to insist on English-medium instruction, and language departments continue to survive on declining budgets. Pupils don’t seem to be as engaged in the performance. They are realistic. English is still useful. It is no longer regarded as identity.

It seems that tech companies and investors noticed before scholars did. In the global South, the fastest-growing e-commerce categories, fintech apps, and streaming subscriptions are all vernacular-first. Punjabi playlists are promoted on Spotify. The largest Indian creators on YouTube hardly ever use English. Though cautious, there is growing recognition that the next billion users won’t be persuaded to use English in the same way as the previous billion.

This does not imply that English is finished. Hegemonies seldom declare their own retirement, and languages don’t die that cleanly. The belief that English is the only language of seriousness, mobility, and modernity is probably coming to an end. Curriculum, careers, marriages, and migrations were all influenced by this presumption. One of the lesser-known tales of this decade is witnessing it loosen, even slowly. There was never a monoglot in the world. For a while, it only pretended to be because it was profitable to do so.